


Postmortem

by Penrose_Quinn



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: AU, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Blood, Chain Pair, F/M, Follows 1999 anime, In which Kurapika is forced to join the Phantom Troupe, Non-Consensual Kissing, Post-Yorknew Arc, Violence, fem!Kurapika
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 17:25:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17370269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penrose_Quinn/pseuds/Penrose_Quinn
Summary: Will we die, just a little?





	Postmortem

_One-hundred twenty-eight_ , Kurapika counts and it haunts her for decades. One-hundred twenty-eight socket-less lives and pairs of eyes.

 _One, two, three . . ._ and so she continues on again until it becomes a tick, a heartbeat, and then a cycle of endless digits in lieu of names. _Eight, nine, ten_ _—_

“Eleven,” Chrollo Lucilfer announces before her kneeling form, ironically in _chains_. “Welcome to the Phantom Troupe.”

The spot she fills is no different from a grave. She fits snugly in the number of eleven like an ornate casket, and he is the murderer, the mortician, and Death all at once when he comes for her due and she pays the price.

 

* * *

 

In Yorknew, Kurapika hits him for thirteen times.

A taunt, an assertion of her gender, and she’s spiraling down in a primal desire for violence and virulence.

And right now, within the dilapidating atrium of an old cathedral, she hits him squarely on his jaw and she does this over and over again until the brutal swell of blows of skin-against-skin and ragged gasps echo in the room, until she’s _red red red_ all over, crimson and wild and appalling as her eyes—and it’s because of _him_ ; he’s bleeding and struck down on the ground as all fallen angels are.

She’s reduced to a rabid beast, maiming him half to death in a pathetic display of power, and he’s _beneath_ her, but he’s not doing anything. He’s a shredded mess of blood and lesions, cut and swollen and broken—can this man even be broken?—though he doesn’t care, and he’s staring at her with those bruises, still so glorious, still a _fucking bastard_.

As he lay there, you can tell in his dark eyes that he’s not the one hurting so badly, and they’re just _mocking_ and she _hates_ him for it.

Kurapika lands another harsh blow on his cheek; her memory fresh with the images of rotting socket-less faces. She pants out, choking from the scent of blood, how it just stings the nostrils, and as she stops, her limit is measured through the final thirty-sixth punch. If she continues until she’s reached fifty, he might die and isn’t eradicating his damned existence better? Justified? ( _Justice_ , really? Justice sounds too clean, too poetic, for a murderer with only but the filthiest hands.) However here she is, swallowing her breaths and trembling, because she’s stopped, wavered. This kind of hesitance is not mercy, but it’s nothing short to weakness.

(she’s going to fade away, piece by piece.)

“I hate you,” she says, _trembling_ —like her own shaken convictions. “I hate you so much.”

“I know,” his eyes close briefly, peacefully. “I know.”

“Then _why_ aren’t doing anything to stop me?”

Chrollo decides to taunt her. “You can’t do it after all?”

“I can,” she threatens him. “I _will_.”

Because what’s keeping her alive now is this hatred because she breathes for spilling his blood, because of him, because of this murderer, who has taken so much from her. She’s the fire in a candle and he’s the wicker, and all she can do is burn him to oblivion.

(but if he’s gone, what is left for her to burn?)

“You try,” he begins, his voice straddling between hoarse and refined, divine and damned, “but you hesitate.”

“Hesitation is met with conflict,” his dark, dark eyes drink in the sight of her, as he has always done a thousand times. How it just . . . _kills_. “Conflict, I see, you deny.”

She grits her teeth. “Don’t you _dare_.”

“You desire to kill me,” he utters aloud, panting out a cold chuckle, “but you need me, Kurapika.”

In a blink, his wax-white hand hauls her collar down and he comes at her with an assault to her mouth; lips against hers in a searing kiss, bleeding and biting and just _burning_. She could taste his bruises and just that spike of poison that is revenge when he embraces her there with his long arms on her waist and his tongue pushing against the roof of her mouth.

And she’s supposed to be resisting. Because this is disgusting and wrong in every single way possible, though she doesn’t because some part of her knows this hurts him just as much as it hurts her. His lips are blistered, so she kisses him back deeper, harder. Then she bites down, tearing skin with her incisors, and although he groans in reaction, he doesn’t screech.

She does.

Pulling away from him, she gasps out promises of ripping his smirk from his face. However she should know better that her warnings have never fazed him, and never will. Worn and humiliated, she attacks him again with her feeble fists even though at this point she should have realized he’s never going to give a damn whenever she punches the shit out of him.

Kurapika hits him for the one-hundred twenty-ninth time and the strike is meant to be against his chest in hopes that maybe if she could put all her strength in that supposedly fatal blow, she can punch a hole through the fabric and sinew and rip out his pathetic beating heart.

(because hers has been open and bleeding for all those miserable years, and because it’s precious, he has done what thieves will do, _steal_.)

The swell of her lips is red and angry and wet, and all she had ever wanted to do was rip his tongue out with the edge of her teeth. But she never does it.

And after awhile, she finds herself inside the bathroom, leaning against the porcelain sink. Her eyes land on the mirror and from the pallid reflection, she’s grown paler in comparison to the person she once was. This is a ghost with red eyes and a dirty mouth. No need for metaphorical cracks on the mirror; there’s already something broken in her soul and there’s nothing left to break, saved for revenge.

The mint green and white tiles are only ever privy to the profanities under her breath, and there’s something consoling about the running faucet, the way it tries to cleanse the blood on her scabbed knuckles (even though they’re never going to be washed away). A douse to the face and Kurapika’s already in a dismal vertigo all over again, spinning round and round like the world’s whirling on her feet. Before she knows it, something hot and acrid rises up from her throat and she retches out the bile and the wretchedness in one gut-wrenching spew.

Despite the acid dripping against her chin, the bitter aftertaste of denial remains like some fucking disease. Decay rested there, at the tingle of her fingertips and the nerve-endings of her teeth, even through the rush of lifeblood in her veins—veins which appear dead and black against the light that branch out from her arms to her hands in a complicated series of spider webs that snare; and she’s _snared_ from the little finger to the very organ beneath her chest, where the blood vessels flow and thrum out requiems for the dead.

Her heart’s pounding against her ribs as if it meekly attempts to break out right there. _One, two, three . . ._ and the steady counting repeats itself until it reaches one-hundred twenty-eight. _One-hundred twenty-nine._

With every beat, she dies a little.


End file.
